World Homeopathy Awareness Week 2010: A Celebration with No Substance

April 6, 2010

Toronto, Ont. (Date, 2010)— Starting on April 10, 2010, Homeopaths will be celebrating World Homeopathy Awareness Week in honor of their founder, 17th century homeopath Samuel Hahnemann. There will be free lectures, discounted visits, homeopathic first aid courses and displays. Sadly, one fact will be missing from all of these promotional materials: homeopathy doesn’t work.

The theme for WHAW this year is Mental Well Being: Mind and Body in Balance and many of the resources offered in Canada will be directed toward mental health and wellness areas. In an attempt to ensure the public gets all of the correct information before entrusting their mental well being to a homeopath, the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS) will be mustering its scientific advisory ranks in order to answer the unsubstantiated claims made by the homeopathic community.

Homeopathic practice is based upon the outdated theory of “like-cures-like’’ What results from this are individualized preparations of various remedies that use profoundly diluted versions of substances thought to cause the symptoms of an illness in order to allow the body to heal itself. Homeopathy is one of several alternative medical theories based upon “vitalism,” a 19th century idea proposing a mystical life-force that animates the body. This was wholly abandoned by modern medicine by the beginning of the 20th century when the germ theory of disease, genetic heredity, and molecular biology started to discover the chemical underpinnings of human physiology.

What homeopaths fail to tell us is that not only do their preparations rarely contain a molecule of the active ingredient, but they defy the laws of modern physics and chemistry and they have not been able to prove efficacy beyond that of placebo in modern scientific trials.

The modern scientific method, the best tool we have to evaluate claims like this, has shown that homeopathy can not and does not work. WHAW will be proposing a lot of ideas that contradict modern medical knowledge and the CASS will ensure that the claims are correctly evaluated.

For additional information on the news that is the subject of this release, contact Michael Kruse at (416) 737-4960.

About the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS) and the Centre for Inquiry Canada (CFI):

CASS is a national, fast response team which critically engages with scientific, technological and medical claims made in public discourse. We address factual inaccuracies and misinformation in public debates by promoting evidence-based science. CASS is a subset of CFI. CFI is the leading freethought organization in Canada promoting reason, science, secularism and freedom of inquiry.

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I'm the Executive Director of the Centre for Inquiry Canada and co-host the student oriented Course of Reason podcast. As an outspoken advocate of freedom of expression and inquiry, science education, church-state separation, and equality rights for non-believers, I have the pleasure of representing freethinkers regularly on the Michael Coren Show on CTS TV as well as in the National Post's Holy Post. I also contribute to Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer magazines.